An Australian bureaucrat who was injured while having sex in a motel room during a business trip has won a five-year legal battle against the federal government for worker’s compensation.
Reporters yesterday read the reasons the Full Bench of the Australian Federal Court gave on Thursday for rejecting an appeal by the government’s insurer, Comcare, against an earlier court declaration that the woman was injured in the course of her employment.
The woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was staying in a motel in the town of Nowra, 160km south of her hometown of Sydney, on Nov. 26, 2007, when she had sex with a male friend in her room. She was then in her late 30s.
During the sex, a glass light fitting was torn from its mount above the bed and landed on her face, injuring her nose and mouth. The courts have not decided on whether the woman or the man dislodged the light, ruling that factor irrelevant to the case.
The woman was treated in hospital for her injuries. She later suffered from depression and was unable to continue working for the government.
Her claim for worker’s compensation for her physical and psychological injuries was initially approved by Comcare, but later rejected after further investigation.
She unsuccessfully appealed to the government’s Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which reviews bureaucrats’ decisions. The tribunal agreed with Comcare that her injuries were not suffered in the course of her employment.
The tribunal found that the Australian government had not induced or encouraged the woman’s sexual conduct and could not have reasonably expected that she would have contemplated it.
The tribunal also found the sex was “not an ordinary incident of an overnight stay” such as showering, sleeping and eating.
The woman won an appeal in the Federal Court on April 19 this year when Judge John Nicholas rejected the tribunal’s findings that the sex had to be condoned by the government if she were to qualify for compensation.
“If the applicant had been injured while playing a game of cards in her motel room, she would be entitled to compensation even though it could not be said that her employer induced her to engage in such activity,” Nicholas wrote in his judgment in favor of the woman receiving compensation.
In the Full Bench decision, judges Patrick Keane, Robert Buchanan and Mordy Bromberg agreed last week that the government’s views on the woman having sex in her motel room were irrelevant.
“No approval, express or implied, of the respondent’s conduct was required,” they said.
It is not yet clear how much compensation the woman will be paid.
Comcare is considering an appeal to the Australian High Court, the country’s highest legal authority, Comcare spokesman Russ Street said.
“The issue is a significant one,” Street said in a statement. “Workers need to be clear about their entitlements and employers should have an understanding of their responsibilities and how to support their staff.”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS